On my walks down the 16th Street Mall these days, I look ahead for Bill. He’s in a wheelchair now, with a container on his lap you can drop money into.
Bill is one of those homeless persons the Downtown Denver Business Improvement District says to “please help. don’t give.” in their anti-panhandling campaign. But I disagree with the campaign, especially for people like Bill.
I knew him from some years ago, in his days of pride and poetic talent and alcoholic rage. We both had volunteered for the monthly newspaper for the homeless, The Denver Voice. Bill slept in those big concrete sewers at construction sites, and wrote by flashlight, muting its glow within his sleeping bag. He was good.
On my Mall walks now, I look ahead to avoid Bill. I don’t want to feel the angst of confronting him face to face again. That first time, nearly bumping into him, I was surprised to see him in a wheelchair, looking so thin and haggard. I said something awkward like, “Well, hi, man … how’s it going?” To which he replied, after a studied moment, looking up, “Different view of life.”
I had only a single dollar bill in my pocket, so I dropped it in his little box. “This is what I’ve got,” I said, and scooted away, embarrassed.
I’ve thought about Bill recently, in light of the new campaign against panhandling by the Business Improvement District. Because I am a member of the Denver Commission to End Homelessness, I pay attention to issues involving homelessness.
In the early days of the commission, I sat in on committee meetings where the downtown business representatives first raised their voices against panhandling. At first, it was “No panhandling at all on the Mall and on East Colfax.” But after the ACLU got involved, that was dropped. It turns out that panhandling – asking people for money in a reasonable manner, like with a sign – is a matter of good ol’ American free speech.
So then it became an “aggressive panhandling” issue brought forward by the businesspeople. They’re tenacious – bulldogs for downtown cleanliness and tourist dollars. The Denver City Council passed a “no aggressive panhandling” ordinance that was basically OK with the homeless community. It was safety-based. To me it seemed reasonable: I don’t like to be hassled either.
I even arranged for a large “aggressive panhandling” poster, with the full text of the law as an “informational warning” to potential panhandlers, to be displayed in the various homeless shelters and agencies around town.
Then, the downtown businesspeople thought more was needed to stop panhandling. There was some funky talk about a substitute of some sort for American coinage, to be handed out by the merchants. That never got much beyond the inane.
The next step was to ban people, basically the homeless, from sitting or lying down on downtown sidewalks. Again, the City Council acquiesced (with the homeless community’s support, since help-based intervention is now part of Denver’s homeless programs).
“No sitting or lying” would, of course, improve the “look” of the Mall. Street entertainers are OK, and people in wheelchairs are OK.
Hence, Bill and me.
The downtown businesspeople would now have us believe that the reasons people give to the homeless are that donors are “overwhelmed with guilt when we juxtapose their situation with ours,” according to Business Improvement District chairman Dan Murphy. Because I know Bill the Poet, I know it’s not that simple. I’ve only begged once, as a young poet in the Grand Place in Brussels in 1965. I had to be drunk, and speaking fake French, to do it.
The businesspeople say giving to the homeless directly provides you with “instant gratification,” as though that’s somehow wrong. And that, to me, seems the bedrock reason for the business community’s campaign to prevent giving directly to panhandlers: social Puritanism.
So let me urge you, if you see Bill on the Mall, please feel whatever emotions you can. He’s a poet. Give him a buck. Denver’s Road Home – the city’s plan to end homelessness – does good work, but not really for someone like Bill.
If you must feel guilt about letting your humanity take over, about giving Bill a gift borne of your human compassion, just objectify him. See him as an urban sculpture: “Self-Portrait of the Poet, Now in a Wheelchair, Waiting to Die.”
Stephen Terence Gould (stgould@peoplepc.com.) is an independent scholar in Denver.
